How many websites really track by IP? Specifically when using Chrome? My understanding is that whether intentional or not, Google has done just about everything possible to make Chrome easier to fingerprint and track. I cannot imagine a new IP privacy tool doing anything to increase privacy for users, not merely increase website’s reliance on the other tracking methods built into Chrome.
There’s an entire class of browser fingerprinting methods which does not rely on cookies or IP addresses whatsoever; this would be hashes of various browser functions such as webrtc, webgl, as well as other information provided by the client.
These technologies are increasingly relied on because privacy efforts have chipped away at how useful cookie or IP-based tracking can be. Google’s efforts to “improve privacy” when it comes to cookies or IP addresses benefit Google directly; the other tracking methods, which are built into Chrome and enabled by default slowly become the only viable method for tracking, and blocking cookie or IP address information becomes less and less relevant with regard to privacy.
Defeating fingerprinting is a really hard problem to solve. So hard that literally nobody has solved it, because exposing all those capabilities are necessary for a lot of sites and webapps to function.
You say that hiding IP addresses somehow benefits Google -- all I see is them doing something they can do that consumers want. It's not benefiting Google strategically in some way.
My point is, I don't see how anyone can possibly complain about this effort from a privacy point of view. Sure it's not solving fingerprinting, but nobody knows how to do that.
There's definitely some of it. Even on a subnet level. I know this because formerly I ran a small ISP where several of my neighbors were using our service, and hence were assigned IP addresses in the same small subnet. There were several cases of advert bleed over between homes (person in home A buys thing X and hey presto ads are served for thing X in home B).
